We know how pervasive the most flagrant discrimination used to be when it came to people with mental disabilities and people with HIV. People with mental disabilities were once warehoused in institutions, apart from society, perhaps treated forever as children, without rights of their own. They were dubbed “retarded,” “insane,” even “mad,” rather than people […]

In an article published a few months ago, Soledad Deza and Adriana Álvarez, examine what they consider to be “an unattended medical obligation”: requiring informed consent to girls and adolescents to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth. Deza and Álvarez assess different interrelated and inescapably linked aspects of early motherhood, among which is […]

This week, the O’Neill Institute released a new brief, Big Ideas: HIV Prevention and Care Systems Have Critical Roles in Addressing Sexually Transmitted Infections. This brief discusses key actions for HIV programs to reduce the public health impact of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the United States. It was written by me and Jeffrey S. […]

It was during my LLM studies last year – I took this one-week course that made me think thoroughly about the types and nature of legal instruments produced by the World Health Organization (WHO). This course, Public Health Emergencies: Enabling Preparedness & Response through Law and Policy, analyzed case studies from various global events including […]

Many communities that hard being hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic are looking for innovative ways to increase efforts to reach out to PWID and reverse the exponential increases in overdose deaths, infectious disease, and substance use in their regions by operating supervised safe injection sites. The city of Philadelphia is well on its […]

I ride my bicycle at least once a day. Whether I’m casually pedalling to work on the Capital BikeShare or I’m speeding down MacArthur Boulevard on my road bike alongside my teammates, cycling is one of my favourite activities. On my bike, I get to roll by traffic during rush hour, I get to enjoy […]

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably more than familiar with evidence-based policymaking. You may not be as used to thinking about laws and policies themselves as a form of data. But they can be. By collecting, mapping and analyzing laws/policies across jurisdictions and over time, we can systematically evaluate the relationships between policies and […]

In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to drum up bipartisan support in the U.S. for federal legislation on various issues, including reproductive health. Yet Senators and Representatives continue to introduce, reintroduce, and sometimes even pass bills aimed at addressing unmet reproductive health needs and improving reproductive health outcomes, particularly among underserved and marginalized […]

On October 22, Mexico’s legislators passed a bill to reform the General Health Law (in Spanish, “Ley General de Salud”) to include front-of-package warning labels. In both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the bill passed in a landslide: in the House of Representatives, there were 458 in favor, 2 abstentions, 0 against; in the Senate, 114 […]

The United States has been battling a serious drug use epidemic for several years. While opioids including prescription opioids and illegal opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl have received significant attention, other drug use, including use of stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, remain major public health issues as well. Drug overdose deaths continue to increase, and […]

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The views reflected in this blog are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law or Georgetown University. This blog is solely informational in nature, and not intended as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed and retained attorney in your state or country.